We present a new compact half-edge data structure for storing polygonal meshes. This data structure allows us to reduce the memory usage for the topological information of the mesh in a 99% with respect to a non compact half-edge. The compact data structure works for any kind of planar graph. To test this compact data structure, we have implemented a new version of the polygonal mesh generator Polylla using the compact half-edge data structure. We tested the mesh generator using two implementations of the half-edge data structure: the first one (non-compact) using an array of structures and the second one (compact) using pemb, a modification to the Turán’s graph representation such that it supports fast navigation. Finally, we show preliminary experiments to compare the performance of compact Polylla versus the non-compact version.